Conference Agenda

In contemporary doctoral education, much less attention is devoted to understanding how students engage with higher-level readings, than it is to supporting the development of their academic writing skills. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and equated with an extractive process to retrieve, survey, or review the information needed for writing.

This paper examines the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms, and practices among doctoral students in the UK and Norway, exploring how a diverse group of doctoral students relates to, makes sense of, and engages with reading as a research practice in its own right. Through the innovative use of a rhythmanalytical-phenomenological methodology centred on the students' lived experience, the project takes a closer look at the spatiotemporal, material, cognitive, and affective dimensions of reading and draws pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education and supervision while foregrounding mutual learning from cultural difference.

Doctoral students in the modern accelerated academy experience mounting institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are increasingly encouraged to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to position themselves more favourably in a hyper-competitive, yet precarious job market.

In this climate, pressures to develop key academic skills such as academic writing abound. This is well reflected in the sustained cross-disciplinary attention enjoyed by the field of academic writing practice. A vast literature is available to both novice and seasoned researchers to help them improve the quality and quantity of writing through a variety of techniques, ‘survival kits’ and motivational mantras (e.g. Sword 2012, 2017, 2023; Murray 2016; Wyse 2017; Moran 2019; Thomson 2023; Sternad and Power 2023).

Comparatively, much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey, or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency (Fulford and Hodgson eds. 2016; Walker 2017). We argue instead that reading should be approached as research, that is a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking and writing constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid 2013; Dakka and Wade 2019).

Reporting on preliminary findings from a pilot project funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme foundation, the paper is guided by a primary research question and two interrelated sub-questions:

How do English and Norwegian doctoral students relate to, make sense of, and engage with reading as a practice, cognitively and emotionally?

• What do different reading practices reveal about different cultural reading and schooling traditions?
• How do different languages and socio-political contexts shape reading as a socio-cultural practice and what can be mutually learned from the Norwegian and English context?

Through such exploration we intend to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for learning in doctoral education (educational engagement and intellectual flourishing), for the practice of doctoral supervision as teaching and mentoring, and, by extension, for higher education as the nurturing, enabling ground of teachers and learners.

Doctoral students are novice researchers whose academic identity is being formed through significant reading encounters during their studies (and beyond). Examining their relationship with reading is vital, then, to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform their thinking (and, ultimately, their writing), and to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.

The reading group (or study group) is a gathering regularly taking place in which a group of interested individuals come together to read a certain text. There is much variety between groups as to how, when and where this takes place. Whether the group comes together to just discuss and read one text (advance or aloud) or that they have a certain continuity and institutionalized practice of meeting and selecting texts. The point of this abstract is not to provide an exhaustive list of different formats of reading groups and their characteristics. Rather, what we want to do is to develop what characterizes the specific pedagogical form of all reading groups. Our engagement with various different sorts of reading groups has led us to deduce some processes that lie at the heart of how the reading group is experienced We will attempt to elaborate on those experiences and develop them through the use of established texts in the field of philosophy of education but also with the aid of authors who have not been given much attention in relation to educational research. Next to this we will try to briefly show how and why the reading group is a relevant phenomenon to study and how our reflections are pertinent for its further understanding.

To us the reading group has always felt as both a highly accelerated form of individual thinking -of producing ideas- and as a truly collective thinking in which the ideas generated are the property of no one and everyone. In regards to this first aspect, we have always had the experience of thinking through the sessions in a really intense manner, to take the time, during, say, two hours, to allow ourselves to really think through the text and understand it, producing new insights and ideas. Part of this also has to do with being in a position in which people can also drive themselves to articulate those ideas in a group, the point of the reading group is not just to read, it’s to think and to discuss. There is always a certain surplus that is generated in the reading group which could not have been produced in reading the text alone. This mode of reading and discussing has the effect that one is intrinsically pushed to articulate certain intuitions that arise in a very precise, coherent and consistent manner, once involved in this activity, activity takes over and we’re swept up into a dynamic interaction between having insights – articulating them- and them being generative of more ideas. One has in this way a very intimate contact with the processes of thinking as such and to the feeling of thinking.

For the other part, looking at it from the collective, thinking can be expanded beyond the individual and seen as a collective activity and we don’t mean this in a uniquely metaphorical sense. The collective dimension of genuine thinking has a rhizomatic structure: there is a certain history, a duration of what has and what has not already been said in the discussion, the insights articulated and points shared have a materiality to them which makes further discussion possible. If one manages to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion this can trigger the reaction of others in terms of further insights. No individual idea stays individual since each idea has its history in the thinking done by the group and finds it’s resonance in the future thinking of the group. In this way the thinking of the group is always expanding outwards and contracting inward nd in this way its drifting from itself.

In discussions about the presence of Latin and Greek in school curricula, two arguments against this presence constantly recur, often in tandem: (1) the classics are not useful (enough) in this day and age; (2) they are the residue and/or symptom of an elitist educational system. In a certain sense, and depending on context, both of these arguments of course hold true: studying the classics hardly qualifies one for better chances of employability or ‘good citizenship’, and in many countries their study is de facto the prerogative of the privileged few. In both cases, however, a deeper-lying, more fundamental argument also seems to be at stake, which revolves around the status of Latin and Greek as dead languages, no longer spoken in ‘real life’. True education, it is claimed, drawing on ideas of Deweyan and Freirian inspiration, is essentially “bio-philic”. It should deal with the living present of educands’ existence, and should try to foster life-enhancing experiences, which precisely emancipate educands from the oppessive, dead weight of pure tradition. Hence dead languages have little or no place in education: their lifeless, strictly intellectual knowledge, which does not afford the crucial dialogal possibilities of living languages, indeed merely serves as cultural capital, an imaginary badge of distinction to keep certain socio-cultural hierarchies in place. The old-fashioned ways in which Latin and Greek are often still taught at schools, moreover confirms their “necrophilia”. As acutely depicted in the ‘progressive-pedagogical’ film The Browning Version (1951), pupils are literally mortified by rote-learning, endless repetition, and the reading of (always the same) texts, far removed from their daily life-worlds.